


Brace

by orphan_account



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Gen, Post-Season/Series 03, Post-Season/Series 05, Where Is Shiro?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-19
Updated: 2018-06-07
Packaged: 2019-04-04 13:11:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14020971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: aka "Where In the Universe is Takashi Shriogane?" sung to the tune of Carmen SanDiego





	1. The Astral Plane

**Author's Note:**

> Dear god, this show needs to stop digging into me and give me some slack. I usually just read things, but the plot bunnies are not shutting up!
> 
> While this is S05 compliant, all scenarios directly build off of how S03 ended. Cuz, well, cuz.

To say Shiro knew space would be an understatement. The pinpricks of light, the vast distance, the cold. He was intimately familiarly with them.

Despite how the scale of it had driven others in the Garrison mad, Shiro would gladly take drifting in space to this.

Space moved. Or more rather, you moved through it and eventually your reference points changed. In the Sol system, you could measure the shift in planets and moons. In a lion, or on the Castle of Lions, you compared your travel to nebulas and planetary systems.

In the astral plane? Nothing.

Shiro wasn’t sure if he’d moved at all, or if he walked in place on a treadmill he couldn’t detect.

The sky never changed color. The stars never shifted. The floor showed no cracks, scuffs, or dents.

Endless, unchanging.

Immaterial, Shiro had no way to tell time. His feet didn’t ache after miles of walking. His stomach didn’t protest the fact it hadn’t received dinner. His eyes didn’t start to droop for sleep.

Shiro, it seemed, had become endless and unchanging too.

Vaguely, he wondered if this was what the Christian god felt like and felt pity for the man. Shito gods, at least, could shift and change.

He let out a gust of air, but it disturbed nothing and he hadn’t felt the stretch of his ribs.

Zarkon said that if you died in the astral plane, you died in the real world. Did starvation count? Could he starve? It had to have been days at least, right? Surely he would have died of thirst by now?

For a lack of anything else to do, Shiro kept walking.

Before, something had snapped him out of here and into his body. Black or Zarkon, a being with a lot of power. Shiro didn’t know if he could do it by himself. But he had tried. Shouting at himself. Pinching himself.

He’d activated the Galra arm too, held it against the skin of his left forearm. The lack of pain had made him hold it here longer than he had planned, watching the skin blister and bleed before turning black.

Only then had he pulled his arm away, horrified at himself.

It should have hurt. But it hadn’t. Maybe it would when he wound up back in his body.

Why hadn’t that been enough to shock him back?

Shiro circled the wound on his arm. It was still there. It hadn’t changed. But surely, Shiro had caused it a few days ago?

How long had he been walking?

He’d stopped once, but nothing had felt different. At least, while walking, Shiro gave himself the impressions he was doing something.

Step. Step.

Step. Step. Step.

Step,step,step,stepstepstepstep.

Shiro shook his head, recognizing at least that his mind had gotten caught in a trance for a few seconds. Minutes? An hour?

He couldn’t tell.

Nothing changed.

Was the team trying to get him back? Was Black?

Had all this endless time really just been a few seconds?

Shiro didn’t know.

He pressed against his burn. Felt no pain. Swallowed, and felt no dry mouth.

Was this real? A dream?

He pressed against the burn again. Harder.

You couldn’t feel pain, in dreams. He didn’t feel pain here. But he was hesitant to call it dreaming. His dreams were dark, twisted things. Filled with yellow eyes and the taste of sand in his mouth.

Neither of those were here.

So not a dream.

Not entirely real either.

Shiro picked up the pace – from a walk to a run. He didn’t feel the burn of air in his lungs. The development of a stitch in his side. Effortlessly, he did an Olympic sprinter’s pace for miles.

Or so he thought

He didn’t know.

And despite the openness, the emptiness around him, Shiro began to feel trapped.

Trapped. And alone.

Maybe forever.

He couldn’t feel the tear tracks on his face.


	2. Living Quintessence

Shiro understood the idea of quintessence. It was energy, powerful enough to fuel an intergalactic empire. And on a smaller scale, the lions.

But he never quite understood what it truly was beyond that.

Allura said the lions matched with a paladin's quintessence, so he had originally thought of it as one's life force. Loosely, once he realized it wasn't just living things that had quintessence too. Like planets. And the lions. They didn't just sync with a paladin, or use a paladin as a battery, Matrix style. They had their own quintessence. Their own sense of self.

He supposed, thinking back to the bits of philosophy he could recall, that quintessence was a person's soul turned into energy. Like thought was really microbursts of bio-electricity.

Maybe. Because, after all, souls had been thought to be one of the things separating man from animal and he was fairly sure animals, and grass and trees, contained quintessence.

Liquid life?

The power of synapses and photosynthesis?

Not knowing was starting to bug him.

Black chucked.

 Shiro scowled and responded with an inquiry of what was so funny.

That was another thing he'd spent his vast amount of time pondering. How he and Black could communicate in his state. Before, he'd thought they'd linked minds through the interface Alfor had built in the lions. Maybe through the astral plane.

But now was different. As far as Shiro could tell, he was _in_ Black's _mind._ If she had a mind. In her soul? Her quintessence?

Black chuckled again, thoughts streaming towards Shiro.

Thoughts were faster than speaking. More clear. They just, sorta, pushed them at each other.

Shiro wished he understood the process better.

Black, again, found him amusing. He was thinking in circles about things that didn't matter.

They do matter, he thought back. He liked understanding things. But also, reduced to just being pure quintessence housed within Black's own larger form, there wasn't much else to do.

No action to take. Nothing to see. Just his thoughts and Black's. And while she seemed able to read his, Shiro couldn't get a peek at hers.

She sent over an image of Shiro in the cockpit. Seemed to say, it's because you are inside.

Inside what? Black's soul?

He got a shrug in return. Things were as they were. Questioning led to more questions, and frustration if Black read Shiro's face right.

Shiro sent disgruntlement back. Questions led to understanding and understanding led to knowing how to get out of here.

Black's answering thought was apologetic. Guilty. Exasperated.

Shiro had thought that thought many times. Despite how many times it circled through his head, how to get out, he failed to come up with a new solution.

And Black didn't seem to have a solution either.

Oh, she had turned him into quintessence and she could spit him back out into his body too. Only... neither of them knew where Shiro's body was. Be it a consequence of Shiro's transformation or something else that happened during the battle, Shiro was stuck as sentient quintessence with no way to communicate with anyone besides Black.

At least he knew the team was doing okay. Black has shared Keith currently flew her, that Princess Allura had taken Blue and Lance Red. Not what Shiro had expected, but the team was adapting. Evolving. Making progress against the Empire.

And Shiro... just floated here.

Black asked if Shiro regretted what she had done. If being dead would have been better than this.

Like before, Shiro couldn't put his thoughts in order to answer her. But she could see the pro and cons as he tried to answer. He liked that he was somewhat alive. Could keep track of his team, watch them grow, try to get Black to understand her reluctant new paladin. But he hated being stuck, felt himself going crazy, and wondered if death would have saved him from an existence he would either come to hate or be numb to.

Black sent happy pulses towards him. She didn't regret her choice; it had been born from a fierce desire to protect him and she would never apologize for that.

And Shiro wouldn't ask her to.

She'd taken him into her very soul. You couldn't argue with that type of love.

Black purred and Shiro felt the vibration through his whole body.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What happens next? Who knows. Shiro needs a body, maybe he steals Kuron's? But I think it might be interesting if he starts to use Blacks. He's used her eyes before, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> If you're new to me, welcome! If you've followed me from other fandoms, I'll still be there. No worries. Either way, welcome to a fic where nothing happy happens.


End file.
